Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

I am astounded at all of the emoting going on in the press and in social media over our alleged president's visit to Hiroshima.  There seems to be a lot of moralizing over whether dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the right decision.  Are you fucking kidding me?  Seriously?

In 1945, Lt. Jack N. Hodge - the N stands for "none" because that is what he wrote on the blank for on his enlistment form where it said "Middle Name" when he signed up - was flying a TBF off the Ticonderoga near Okinawa waiting for the invasion of Japan to begin.  Dad was a torpedo plane pilot because he signed up shortly after the Battle of Midway, where the Navy had essentially all of their torpedo plane pilots shot down (meaning "dead")...Ensign Hodge, you just volunteered for a torpedo plane duty.  Military planners were anticipating 1,000,000 American casualties from an invasion of the Japanese home islands.  That is one million, with an 'M".  I am here to write this, in all probability, because the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Japan and ended the war.  Needless to say, I'm a fan of the decision.

If you're not, I won't try to convince you otherwise.  All I would ask is that you step back from the mindless echo chamber of social media and read some history.  The bibliography of WWII history is huge, but allow me to throw out a few titles:

With the Old Breed - E.B. Sledge
Good Bye Darkness - William Manchester
Helmet For My Pillow - Robert Leckie
Strong Men Armed - Robert Leckie
Red Blood, Black Sand - Chuck Tatum

These books are significant in that they were written by Marines who were in combat in the Pacific. E.B. Sledge's and Chuck Tatum's books were the partially the basis for The Pacific mini-series.

Here are some more:

Shattered Sword - Jonathan Parshall...A history of the Battle of Midway that is based on both Japanese and American sources.
Neptune's Inferno - James Hornfischer...a description of the naval battles during the Guadalcanal campaign and there is no better description of the horrors of fighting between big gun ships than this.
Two Ocean War - Adm. Samuel Eliot Morrison...a condensation of Morrison's 15 volume naval history of WWII.
Last Stand of the Tin Can Soldiers - James Hornfischer...A history of the Battle of Samar.
The Conquering Tide - Ian Toll...A fairly even handed view of the Pacific War. I am right in the middle of reading this now.

I am just picking books at random off my bookshelf and out of my Kindle (others should feel free to add), but my point here is the War in the Pacific is extensively documented from a lot of different points of view.  I am convinced that when our fathers and grandfathers went to war against the Japanese they became giants walking the Earth, but do some reading make up your own mind.